Stardew Valley is a game full of surprises. From the turn of seasons to the discovery of hidden caverns, the game offers countless opportunities for exploration and serendipity. Yet, sometimes the most astonishing surprises come from where you least expect them. For instance, did you know you can transform yellow sofas into cloth using a loom? In this article, we’ll explore this fascinating bug and discuss how you can leverage it to your advantage.
Accessing the Furniture Catalogue
Before diving into this magical cloth-making process, you’ll first need to open your Furniture Catalogue. Browse through the items until you find the yellow sofa. Once located, go ahead and pick up multiple units of the yellow sofa. To add the sofa to your backpack quickly, hold down the right mouse button and press ‘E’.
Why Bother With Yellow Sofas?
You might be wondering, why yellow sofas? Why not any other furniture? The secret lies in the game’s item categorization system and how the loom recognizes these categories—or rather, how it fails to do so. We’ll explore this in more detail later.
The Magical Loom
Head over to where you’ve set up your loom(s). With the yellow sofa in hand, interact with the loom. Miraculously, the loom starts to operate, transforming the yellow sofa into cloth! The loom takes approximately 4 in-game hours to complete this transformation.
The Mystery Unraveled: Item IDs and Categories
What makes this bug so captivating is that it reveals a peculiarity about how the game categorizes its various items. In Stardew Valley, items are grouped into different classes, such as machinery, goods, shoes, weapons, and furniture. Each category has its distinct ID sequence.
While the loom is designed to transform animal wool into cloth, due to the item ID overlap between wool and the yellow sofa, the loom treats them as identical for the crafting process. Specifically, both the yellow sofa and animal wool share the same ID of 440, although they belong to different categories. The loom, in this case, is indifferent to these categories; it simply recognizes the item ID.
Financial Gains and Limitations
At this point, you may be calculating the potential financial gains. While this exploit could technically be profitable, it doesn’t come without its limitations. For example, you can only carry 36 yellow sofas in a level-3 backpack due to their non-stackable nature. The time it takes to load and unload these sofas into looms also limits the overall efficiency of this method.
I conducted an experiment in the Quarry, placing around 36 looms in two rows. It took about 4 in-game hours to load about 350 yellow sofas. Given the cloth sells for 658 gold each, you can potentially make about 1,150,000 gold in a day. However, this pales in comparison to the money you could make from brewing Starfruit Wine or Ancient Fruit Wine, which sell for over 2,000 gold each.
The Grind for Maximum Efficiency
Reaching peak efficiency in this method requires considerable resources. You’ll need roughly 350 looms for continuous operation, each requiring 60 wood, 30 fiber, and one Pine Tar to craft. Acquiring this volume of materials, particularly fiber, can be a considerable challenge.
To Bug or Not to Bug?
Stardew Valley is no stranger to quirky exploits and bugs, from wallpapers that can be used as a substitute for precious stones to wallpapers that can hatch dinosaurs. So why hasn’t this bug been patched yet? Perhaps the game’s developer sees this as a fun and harmless quirk—after all, sofas are made of cloth, and turning them back into cloth has a poetic sense of recycling.
Conclusion
While it may not be the most efficient money-making strategy, the yellow sofa-to-cloth exploit is a fascinating glimpse into the oddities that make Stardew Valley such a delightful game. Whether you’re in it for the profits or just looking for some entertaining diversion, it’s another unusual way to engage with the magical world of Stardew Valley.
So, what do you think? Will you be incorporating this quirk into your Stardew Valley strategy, or is it just a fun gimmick to try once? Either way, it adds another layer of charm to this already enchanting game.